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His hardware is supported by Mesa (and very well so), but when he's too lazy to install the drivers and relies on what is shipped by his outdated distro (or choose another distro), well, that's not a good thing for a developer, to put it kindly.

But not with Debian 6.

Originally Posted by http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2010/09/demystifying-opengl-desktop-effects/comment-page-1/#comment-16748

Martin sagt:
12. September 2010 um 6:14 pm

I just did compile KDE from trunk on a new system and it took me something about one day on a distribution I know. I have no idea about how to compile a kernel, Xorg or drivers. Sorry but that is just above my knowledge. I need my system to work and using drivers from development versions is nothing I want to do on my productive environment. You can see that I care about a stable system by the fact that I use Debian.

For anything else like using another distribution: sorry no time for it. I am only a freetime developer and have a regular job where I cannot work on KWin.

He doesn't need to test a "gazillion" distros, he just needs to test Mesa 7.8+ . That is the oldest Mesa a distro with KDE 4.5 will use.

So enough with this failed agrument of "gazillion distros", that is only for M$ supporters and Linux n00bs...

As for the fact that he is a volunteer, this is rather bad for KDE in general.

So you want to tell me that KDE tries to "innovate the desktop" using only a small number of volunteer devs who are using old distros and nvidia blobs? And they push those features to the public without having test them?

You guys are looking at the wrong things

The problem is KDE 4.5 was released and some users had issues with kwin, not Martin himself.

They coded kwin to trust what drivers report and then use that. There are some corner cases where certain driver stack versions (kernel, x, driver) cause issues so they have to blacklist for the sake of the users. This blacklist and the sanity checks can be disabled (much more easily than installing the latest stack) for testing.

As for the fact that he is a volunteer, this is rather bad for KDE in general.

So you want to tell me that KDE tries to "innovate the desktop" using only a small number of volunteer devs who are using old distros and nvidia blobs? And they push those features to the public without having test them?

WOW let me use KDE 4.5 for production work then, i am sold...

Damn troll. Check this in Gnome. It's made mainly in devs free time. So you want to tell me that Gnome tries to "compete" being developed mainly in free time? And about volunteers:

In reality, 37% of GNOME developers are paid to work on GNOME or GNOME and other FOSS according to the PhD thesis. The number for KDE was correct (38%). So according to this PhD there is not a lot of difference in the percentage of paid developers between GNOME and KDE.

"So you want to tell me that Gnome tries to "compete" using only a small number of volunteer devs? Btw. how did you figure out such stupid conclusions?

He doesn't need to test a "gazillion" distros, he just needs to test Mesa 7.8+ .

No, he needs not. The Xorg/Mesa devs need to test their code. KWin's code works. It's the drivers that cause the problems, not KWin.

The (false) argument is that all the problems would magically just not have happened if the Xorg/Mesa bug reports came from Martin instead of other users.
Guess what? Wrong!

As Xorg/Mesa devs confirmed in the last thread about this issue, they received bug reports, just not from Martin himself. Have all those bugs been resolved? No.
Is OpenGL support working and complete? No.
Do drivers falsely report features to work but instead only activate something broken? Yes.

No, he needs not. The Xorg/Mesa devs need to test their code. KWin's code works. It's the drivers that cause the problems, not KWin.

The (false) argument is that all the problems would magically just not have happened if the Xorg/Mesa bug reports came from Martin instead of other users.
Guess what? Wrong!

As Xorg/Mesa devs confirmed in the last thread about this issue, they received bug reports, just not from Martin himself. Have all those bugs been resolved? No.
Is OpenGL support working and complete? No.
Do drivers falsely report features to work but instead only activate something broken? Yes.

You seriously don't get it, do you?

If you were paying any attention, you would have seen in other threads Xorg devs talking about the subject.

Put this in your head: Just because you develop a video game for windows on NVIDIA cards, doesn't mean it will work in exactly the same way for ATI cards. Game developers test their engines with both.

So if this is true for Windows and binary blobs, why wouldn't it be true for linux?

Drivers devs don't lie, when a feature is supported it is supported period. But bugs may exist, and the implementation may have problems. Only through testing these problems are exposed.

So when someone develops a fscking Window manager with compositing, he needs to check it with all major implementations of graphic stacks. And he needs to communicate all driver problems to driver devs during the beta phase of the project, and if the devs do not solve the problem in time, take measures in order to deliver a stable product.

Your beloved KDE devs live in their own world outside of our own, and can't do this very simple thing. And then they wonder why KDE sucks...